Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
1–10 of 88 posts
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#2And it's quite scary if you consider the amount of methane stored in Siberia and northern Canada.
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#3I believe this same dynamic will apply to the oceans as they warm. They're like a can of Coke. Heat it up and the carbonation goes away. It's a horrifying positive feedback loop of global warming.
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#4Why on earth is there methane trapped in the permafrost?
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#5Why on earth is there methane trapped in the permafrost?
Insane amounts of carbon in the frozen soil. Once thawed, soil microbes transform it into carbon dioxide and methane.
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#6Why on earth is there methane trapped in the permafrost?
The same way all these hydrocarbons got there, organic matter got there (at some previous time or through processes that moved it there) and then, under the right conditions, microbes decomposed it.
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#7I'm really curious about marine cloudseeding as a potential mitigator to permafrost melt. Essentially, high-efficiency saltwater aerosolization to create nuclei for cloud formation...
Here is a 2019 paper on the critical role of clouds in arctic cooling https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44155-w#Sec7
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#8I believe this same dynamic will apply to the oceans as they warm. They're like a can of Coke. Heat it up and the carbonation goes away. It's a horrifying positive feedback loop of global warming.
And then the whole melting of sea ice thing. Sea ice is pretty much the whitest/most reflective surface on the planet. It then melts into the darkest/most absorbent surface on the planet.
Are there any stabilizing forces we know about? I only ever hear about these types of positive feedback loops, and it scares the hell out of me.
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#9I believe this same dynamic will apply to the oceans as they warm. They're like a can of Coke. Heat it up and the carbonation goes away. It's a horrifying positive feedback loop of global warming.
Yup, it's a dangerous runaway train rolling down a parabolic slop
Re: Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter
#10I believe this same dynamic will apply to the oceans as they warm. They're like a can of Coke. Heat it up and the carbonation goes away. It's a horrifying positive feedback loop of global warming.
And then the whole melting of sea ice thing. Sea ice is pretty much the whitest/most reflective surface on the planet. It then melts into the darkest/most absorbent surface on the planet. Are there any stabilizing forces we know about? I only ever hear about these types of positive feedback loops, and it scares the hell out of me.
Based on geological history, the negative feedbacks seem predominant for small perturbations, but if you push things a little too hard the positive feedbacks take over. It's happened before several times; a little initial heating from orbital variations, which leads to greenhouse gas emissions, which leads to the global average temperature going up several degrees. A good explanation of the evidence for this is in James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren.
People have long thought the threshold to be around 2 degrees C, but now some are thinking it's more like 1.5. The CO2 level everybody agreed was safe was 350 ppm.